City Council, City of Peoria

Next council meeting will focus on budget

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The agenda for Tuesday night’s Peoria City Council meeting is short — just two items. But don’t let that fool you into thinking it will be a short meeting.

It’s that time of year when the council starts discussing the dreaded budget. In keeping with the council’s desire to include more meaningful input from citizens, Tuesday’s meeting will offer residents a chance to comment on the budget after some pertinent information is presented:

A. REVIEW of CURRENT OUTSTANDING CAPITAL PROJECTS;
B. PRESENTATION OF OVERALL VISION/MISSION/CORE FUNCTIONS;
C. REVENUE REVIEW;
D. PUBLIC COMMENT Relating to the 2009 CITY BUDGET.

If you’re looking for information on the city’s budget, look no further than peoriabudget.com. City staff has assembled a number of helpful charts and graphs to give you a picture (literally) of the city’s revenue and expenditures, broken down a number of different ways. Here are a couple that will be germane to Tuesday’s meeting (click on the thumbnail to see the full graph):

These two graphs show the revenue sources for the city. They’ll come in handy when it comes time figure out how we’re going to raise more revenue for the city’s needs.

The Peoria Chronicle

Site news: Comment toolbar added

Leave a comment

Anyone who leaves comments on blogs knows that, if you want anything other than plain text, you have to know a little HTML coding. But not everyone knows that, or wants to learn it. And so, I’ve had some requests for a toolbar on the comment box that will allow commenters to bold, italicize, and add hyperlinks to their comments.

Well, you’ve got it. I had a hard time finding a WordPress plugin that would give the comments box this functionality. But the “blogfather” Billy Dennis found one for me. My thanks to him. Also, thanks to the person who wrote the plugin. I hope WordPress will build this into a future update, as it seems like an obvious upgrade to make.

The only thing missing from the toolbar is a “blockquote” button, which would have been helpful. But I think the tools that are provided will meet most commenters’ needs. Let me know if you have any trouble using it. If your comments don’t show up, it’s possible that it got caught in the Akismet spam filter (especially if you used hyperlinks). Just send me an e-mail and I’ll rescue it. If, for some reason, this toolbar “breaks” the site, I’ll deactivate it.

Hope you find this upgrade helpful. Happy commenting!

Radio

“Unforgettable 1350” gone but not forgotten

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Everyone knows by now that 1350 WOAM and 94.3 WPMJ have gone off the air. But they deserve a requiem nonetheless.

Although their music was syndicated, 1350 AM had no small amount of local programming. Every morning, there was Breakfast with Royce [Elliott] and Roger [Monroe]. They had a lot of special guests, and of course a lot of humor. And during the summer, they carried the Peoria Chiefs baseball games. I’ll never forget hearing them win the Midwest League championship — an unbelievable come-from-behind win in the ninth inning (naturally, they were still a Cardinals affiliate then). They carried other local sports as well.

I didn’t listen to 94.3 very much, as it was all syndicated oldies music. Occasionally I’d turn it on for a song or two. It took on the oldies format after 93.3 jettisoned their “Big Oldies” moniker. Frankly, I won’t miss this station much, but I will definitely miss 1350. It had a definite local feel to it, without being talk radio. It had a lot of variety, and I’ll miss that.

On a positive note, the paper reports that station owner Bob Kelly “said he would continue to run the Kelly Communications Co. despite the stations being off the air with the hope of eventually bringing the stations back online. ‘I’m going to work full-time on getting financing.'”

So maybe 1350 will be back again someday. Hope so.

Nation/World

House begins debate on Senate bailout package

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For those of you in the 18th Congressional District, here’s the telephone number for Ray LaHood: (202) 225-6201. (If you live in a different district, you can find your representative’s phone number on the Clerk of the House of Representatives’ page.)

I would encourage you to do what I’ve done: call and urge Rep. LaHood to vote against the Senate’s bailout package. I know LaHood voted for the first one, and he believes a bailout package is needed. But this bill is even worse than the last one, including all kinds of indefensible pork that squanders more taxpayer money.

There are $6 million in tax breaks for the manufacturers of wooden arrows.

Another $33 million in tax relief for corporations operating in American Samoa territory.

And don’t forget the $192 million break for Puerto Rican and Virgin Islands rum producers.

U.S. senators on Wednesday tacked these incentives and nearly $150 billion in other unrelated tax breaks on to the $700 billion emergency rescue bill for the nation’s troubled financial institutions.

Besides the added pork, many economists have been saying that this bill simply won’t work to solve our credit crisis. You don’t hear these voices, unfortunately, because the media by and large hasn’t covered them, as this article from the Chicago Tribune points out:

If you’ve spent much time listening to cable news lately, you would think there is universal agreement among economists that an immediate, enormous government intervention in the markets is the only way to stave off a recession, and perhaps even a depression. This is simply false. Many economists reject the notion that something must be done immediately and have called for more careful consideration of a wider range of options. Some even reject the premise that any bailout action will make much of a difference.

This bill needs to be voted down and a serious deliberation needs to take place. Congress should stop this rush to do “something,” and focus on doing what is best.

2008 Campaign

Biden wins debate; Palin does okay

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Tonight was the big debate between vice presidential candidates Joe Biden (D) and Sarah Palin (R). Expectations were low for Palin because she’s looked pretty bad in recent television interviews — especially the one with Katie Couric. That worked to her benefit; she only had to do okay for her performance to be perceived as successful.

And Palin did, in fact, do okay. She stuck to her talking points. She dodged some questions. At times, she had some good, substantive responses. At other times, she tried to make up for lack of substance with excessive colloquial language (although, in fairness, some say that’s “Sarah being Sarah”). Most of the time, her answers sounded rehearsed, and she repeated a lot of stump-speech lines that are, frankly, getting moldy. But, she held her own and didn’t implode. And she got better as the debate progressed. Well done.

Joe Biden was expected to do well in this debate, and he did. He has had lots of experience debating in the U. S. Senate, and it showed. He looked confident and comfortable. His answers were substantive and he had a lot of good sound bites I’m sure we’ll be hearing in the news the next several days. He connected with the viewer. He showed emotion, such as when he talked about knowing what it’s like to be a single parent. You felt, as a viewer, like what he said was genuine. Not that he did everything right, but he came across very polished and at ease. He certainly reiterated a lot of talking points as well.

Now, I’m writing this while watching the post-debate punditry, and they appear to all be giving Palin much better marks than I just did. Perhaps I’m still tainted by the horrible showing she had in those CBS interviews. Or maybe I just hadn’t lowered my expectations as much as everyone else had, so I’m a little more disappointed.

I think the bottom line is, she did no harm tonight. I don’t think this debate changed anything in the campaign — i.e., it didn’t help or hurt it. It won’t give the Republicans or the Democrats a bounce, but will likely just reinforce voters’ feelings. And I guess that makes it a success.

St. Louis Cardinals

Cardinals wrap-up for 2008

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Well, the Cardinals season is over for 2008, and they didn’t make it into the post-season. This year, in my opinion, it all came down to pitching. Their pitching — especially the bullpen — was their Achilles heel. The Cardinals’ website sums it up well:

The back end of the bullpen never fully recovered after Jason Isringhausen lost his effectiveness and got hurt. Carpenter made only three starts before he got hurt again, and Wainwright was down for more than 2 1/2 months, so while the rotation was deep and solid, it didn’t have the front-end punch that was hoped for. And the offense bogged down frequently over the final two months as Ankiel, Glaus and Molina dealt with injuries.

It was encouraging to see them end the season strongly with a six-game winning streak. Hopefully they will pick up in 2009 where they left off the end of this year and continue that winning streak, and go all the way to the World Series again. A few key acquisitions in the bullpen would go a long way to making that a reality.

Related note: I’m mothballing the MLB Standings widget in my sidebar until next season.

2008 Campaign

LaHood photo under scrutiny

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The Peoria Times-Observer reports:

The use of a photograph in political ads for Darin LaHood, the Republican candidate for Peoria County State’s Attorney, has promoted an inquiry by the office of the Peoria County State’s Attorney’s office at the request of Peoria Heights Police chief Dustin Sutton.

Sutton requested the state’s attorney’s office look into the matter after the Peoria Times-Observer brought elections ethics law to Sutton’s attention.

Click on the link to read the whole article. The law that the Times-Observer cited is essentially the state government’s version of the local ordinance Gary Sandberg used to insist that Aaron Schock should pay back the City of Peoria for costs related to Schock’s fundraiser with President Bush. A couple of things to note:

  1. Any violation of this law would be against the “governmental entity” — in this case the Peoria Heights Police Department — and not Darin LaHood.

  2. Clearly, Kevin Lyons needs to recuse himself from this case immediately since a more obvious conflict of interest could not be conceived. Lyons is running against LaHood for State’s Attorney. The Peoria Heights Police endorsed LaHood for State’s Attorney. If Lyons takes action against their appearance in his opponent’s political ad, it would be perceived as nothing less than political payback.

If there’s been a violation of the law, it should definitely be dealt with, the sooner the better — but NOT by the Peoria County State’s Attorney office. They should recuse themselves because of conflict of interest and have a neighboring county’s State’s Attorney (e.g., Stewart Umholtz in Tazewell County) take care of this.

City of Peoria, Crime, Peoria Police

Violent crime declining in Peoria

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Steve Settingsgaard. The police union gave him a vote of no confidence. Residents and some in the press criticized him for posting mug shots of prostitution and drug arrestees. Yet local government officials and many citizens defend him and even sing his praises. Why?

One word: Results.

In 2007, there were a total of 74 shootings and 16 homicides; 104 shootings and 18 homicides were logged in 2006. So far this year, there have been four homicides.

No doubt some will try to attribute these results to everything under the sun other than the police chief; and to be sure, the credit absolutely needs to be spread around. These outcomes aren’t the result of a one-man show. But you can bet if the trend were the other way, the fingers of blame would all be pointing directly at Settingsgaard.

So I say, let’s give credit where credit is due. Nobody’s perfect. We’re never going to agree on every tactic used by the chief. But let’s acknowledge and be thankful that our city has gotten safer under his watch.